Rights, Goods, and Proportionate War

Abstract

1. INTRODUCTIONAt the moral core of the Just War Tradition (JWT) is the claim that a just war must have a just cause, where a just cause involves the commission of some grave moral wrong. As a matter of sociological and psychological fact, victims of wrongdoing are inclined to take umbrage at the injustices inflicted on them and to take the violations inflicted on them to permit some appropriately vigorous response. Other things equal, the more egregious the violation, the stronger the victim's inclination to respond. As a matter of brute sociological and psychological fact, then, the members of a community that has been victimized by wrongdoing that is grave enough to satisfy the just cause requirement will likely be inclined to respond in a most ?vigorous' manner. Correlatively, many will find alien-and perhaps even offensive-the demand that they restrain themselves from taking the means necessary to respond to the egregious violations to which they have been subjected. But the possibility that those who belong to a violated community must exercise just this kind of restraint is a clear implication of any adequate understanding of the JWT. For fundamental to the JWT is the claim that a community can have a fully sufficient just cause to respond to an enemy attack and yet be morally forbidden to do so.1 This is, I think, one of the most difficult holdings of the JWT.The JWT's ad bellum proportionality requirement (ABP) captures that fundamental, difficult truth. According to the ABP, a community may wage war in response to a violation that satisfies the just cause requirement only if the relevant goods achieved by so responding are proportionate to the relevant evils caused thereby. My main aim in this paper is to engage recent work by Thomas Hurka regarding what makes certain goods and evils relevant to a proportionality assessment. A secondary aim is to specify the place of the ABP in the JWT's overall justificatory architecture. Given these two rather limited aims, it should be clear that I do not pretend to provide a complete account.2. AN INITIAL EXPLICATION OF THE PROPORTIONALITY REQUIREMENTLet me begin by providing a brief explication of the ABP. Basic to the moral vision of the JWT is the claim that human beings naturally and properly belong to various communities each of which is presumptively prohibited from attacking any another. This presumption against war can be overcome only when one community violates another in some egregious respect(s). But the moral standing of a given war cannot be entirely a function of the normative relations between violators and violated. This is because the morally relevant consequences of war are seldom, if ever, limited only to those who commit the violation that provides for a just cause. Far from it: in the actual world, the deployment of military violence in response to an egregious wrong will typically have dire consequences for human beings who play no role at all in committing that violation. Such 'innocent' human beings must be given their normative due. The primary function of the ABP in the JWT's overall justificatory framework is to formalize that requirement: the JWT permits war only when some particular community commits a relevantly egregious violation, but assesses that prima facie permission in light of the consequences of war for all innocents, irrespective of communal membership. If the consequences of waging a given war are ?excessively bad,' then that war is ?disproportionate' and so morally impermissible.Of course, we need to provide this rather unspecific understanding of the ABP with a bit more granularity. To that end, note, first, that although the ABP implies that every war ought to be assessed in light of relevant consequences, it does not mandate anything like a global consequentialist assessment. That is, it does not require us to agglomerate all of the goods and evils that result from Cl's war with C2, compare that result with the agglomerated goods and evils of the various alternatives to Cl's waging war with C2, and conclude that Cl's war is permissible only if its net result is higher than all of the alternatives. …